Hollywood glitterati supporting Clinton and Obama but don't expect them to surrender any privileges!

The Hollywood glitterati are lining up to support the two current stars of the Democratic Party, Senatots Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who have both began campaigning for their Party's 2008 presidential nomination.

The Washington Post says that the entertainment industry has long been a cornerstone of support for Democrats seeking public office, and Hillary Cliinton, like her husband, former President Bill Clinton, has been one of the chief beneficiaries.

But a newcomer to Hollywood's money trail, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, is headed next month to a fund-raiser hosted by three of the most influential moguls in show business -- Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks.

Invitations went out this week to 700 donors and activists asking them to give the allowed annual maximum of $2,300 per person to meet Obama at a Beverly Hills reception on February 20th.

HEDGING THEIR BETS

The Post says that many of the well-heeled in Los Angeles will write checks to more than one campaign, especially early in the race, as donors hedge their bets, experts said.

"There will be a lot of donations to multiple candidates," Democratic strategist Bill Carrick said.

During the 2004 election cycle, the movie, television and music industries gave a combined $33.1 million to candidates for federal office, most of that to Democrats, according to the non-profit Center for Responsive Politics.

Spielberg plans to help several candidates and has also volunteered to host a fund-raising event for Clinton, according to his political adviser, Andy Spahn.

Spahn added that Spielberg will settle eventually on a single candidate, as will many donors. While Katzenberg has endorsed Obama, Geffen has not made public his support for any single candidate.

Thomas Frank, the author of What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America wrote an article for the Financial Times on the Democratic Convention in 2004, titled: At the Democratic Dream Factory.

In his book, Frank refers to what he calls the 'thirty-year backlash' -- the populist revolt against a supposedly liberal establishment. The high point of that backlash is the Republican Party's success in building the most unnatural of alliances: between blue-collar Midwesterners and Wall Street business interests, workers and bosses, populists and right-wingers. In asking 'what's the matter with Kansas?' -- how a place famous for its radicalism became one of the most conservative states in the union -- Frank, a native Kansan and onetime Republican, seeks to answer some broader American riddles: Why do so many of Americans vote against their own economic interests? Where's the outrage at corporate manipulators? And whatever happened to middle-American progressivism?

Frank answers them by examining pop conservatism -- the bestsellers, the radio talk shows, the vicious political combat -- and showing how America's long culture wars have left it with an electorate far more concerned with their leaders' 'values' and down-home qualities than with their stands on hard questions of policy.

In his Financial Times article, Frank recounted how as a journalist, he attended a party at Boston's Ritz-Carlton Hotel that was sponsored by a film industry lobby group. The journalists were not allowed to mingle with the guests because of the presence of celebrities. The party was a transplanted bit of California with its accompanying social hierarchy and the minor Hollywood figures were the ones illuminated by portable spotlights and talking into cameras.

Frank wrote in the FT that there is 'a vision of liberals as a ruling elite, a collection of snobs...that believes it is more sophisticated than average people...When celebrities stump for their candidate of choice, the ones they support are usually Democrats...Somehow, this glitzy world of risqué dresses and velvet ropes has the opposite effect on much of the public. They hate it and hate everything Hollywood has come to stand for.

After all, Hollywood stars are the closest thing America has to aristocracy and being instructed by psuedo-rebellious aristocrats (as they mingle with millionaire lobbyists) cannot help but rub people up the wrong way. What the stars' Democratic allegiance shows to this part of the public is not the glamour of Democratic candidates but their shallowness and insufferable moral superiority; the distance of those candidates from their historical base of average Americans. For them, Hollywood's superficial leftism only validates the Republicans to be the party of the common man.'

Frank recounted how he got rid of his journalist dog tag and joined the great and good. The special guest Senator John Breaux mounted the podium and spoke of cracking down on illegal copying, thereby ensuring that 'creative' people are 'justifiably compensated.' Cameras clicked for a shot of Breaux sporting a boyish grin together with a member of an acting family, known as 'the Baldwin,' who displayed a 'practiced sullenness.' A woman in a headset barked: 'C'mon celebrities' and the exalted ones were ushered towards the elevators.

It could be President Clinton or President Obama at 12 noon on Jan 20, 2009 but either way, the Hollywood glitterati are not supporting anything that will change its status as the overpaid, conspicuous consumers of America.

It must be fun to be on a winning side and easier work for the fading stars as they vie to become Unicef Humanitarian Ambassadors!

30 years of nutritional science has made Americans and others: sicker, fatter and less well nourished - A plea for a return to plain old food

In a mega-article in the New York Times magazine published on Sunday, Jan 28, 2007, Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, wrote: Eat food. Not too much --- Mostly plants - That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

Pollen writes: "I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to
flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible food like substances in the supermarket. These
novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that “it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such
formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)"

BEYOND NUTRITIONISM

Skipping to the conclusion, Pollen says that to medicalize the diet problem is of course perfectly consistent with nutritionism.

He asks what might a more ecological or cultural approach to the problem recommend? How might we plot our escape from nutritionism and, in turn, from the deleterious effects of the modern diet?

"In theory nothing could be simpler — stop thinking and eating that way — but this is somewhat harder to do in practice, given the food environment we now inhabit and the loss of sharp cultural tools to guide us through it. Still, I do think escape is possible, to which end I can now revisit — and elaborate on, but just a little — the simple principles of healthy eating I proposed at the beginning of this essay, several thousand words ago," Professor Pollen writes and recommends trying these few (flagrantly unscientific) rules of thumb, collected in the course of his nutritional odyssey, and see if they don’t at least point us in the right direction.

• Eat food. Though in our current state of confusion, this is much easier said than done. So try this: Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.


• Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was more healthful than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks. When Kellogg’s can boast about its
  Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. (The American Heart Association charges food makers for their endorsement.) Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.


• Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.


• Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.


• Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food — measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) — costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should. Paying more for food well grown in good soils — whether certified organic or not — will contribute not only to your health (by reducing exposure to pesticides) but also to the health of others who might not themselves be able to afford that sort of food: the people who grow it and the people who live downstream, and downwind, of the farms where it is grown. - - - "Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. “Calorie restriction” has repeatedly been shown to slow aging in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention. Food abundance is a problem, but culture has helped here, too, by promoting the idea of moderation. Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called “Hara Hachi Bu”: eat until you are 80 percent full. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.
• Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. Scientists may disagree on what’s so good about plants — the antioxidants? Fiber? Omega-3s? — but they do agree that they’re probably really good for you and certainly can’t hurt. Also, by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians. Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he advised treating meat more as a flavoring than a food.
• Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economies and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others: Inuit not so well as Italian. In borrowing from a food culture, pay attention to how a culture eats, as well as to what it eats. In the case of the French paradox, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and alcohol?!) so much as the dietary habits:
  small portions, no seconds or snacking, communal meals — and the serious pleasure taken in eating. (Worrying about diet can’t possibly be good for you.) Let culture be your guide, not science.


• Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal or journalism. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it. So you might want to think about putting down this article now and picking up a spatula or hoe.


• Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases. That of course is an argument from nutritionism, but there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of “health.” Biodiversity in the diet means less monoculture in the fields. What does that have to do with your health? Everything. The vast monocultures that now feed us require tremendous amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to keep from collapsing. Diversifying those fields will mean fewer chemicals, healthier soils, healthier plants and animals and, in turn, healthier people. It’s all connected, which is another way of saying that your health isn’t bordered by your body and that what’s good for the soil is probably good for you, too.

Dublin's Burlington Hotel is to be razed: The Merrion Centre, Merrion Inn and adjacent service station next?

The Merrion Inn - see Dublin Pubs

The closure of the Irish sugar industry has given food group Greencore the opportunity to become a property developer. Fruit importer Fyffes has become a big property investor. The top two banks have sold off their key properties to developers to enable them to extend further mortgage credit.

Ireland's biggest hotel group JurysDoyle has already sold the sites of its two principal hotels in Dublin to a developer who plans to raze tem later this year. Today the hotel group effectively said that the opportunity to cash in on a prime site had prompted it to announce that it will sell its landmark Burlington Hotel. There were crocodile tears about the loyal staff but wouldn't it be foolish not to jump on the property bandwagon while the going is good?

We lose some big hotels - so what! Motor service stations have been the focus of developers as well. Motorists just have to be more careful to watch the gauge given the scarcity of stations!

The former Statoil service station on the Merrion Road, in South Dublin, has apparently been sold and it's rumoured that the adjacent Merrion Inn, is the target of the same individual. It has even been suggested that the Merrion Centre, which has Tesco as a tenant and offices including insurance group AIG, at the same junction, opposite the hospital, may also be on the block.

The Merrion Inn has been a longtime amenity in the area and is popular with hospital staff, visitors and nearby office workers for lunch.

We've a corrupt planning system that has been the subject of a tribunal that has been sitting since 1997. Bizarrely, there has been no change in the system that spawned the planning corruption.

Developers often take a punt when buying a site that may not be zoned for their planned type of development.

Councillors are often pliable to developer demands and while the day of the brown envelope is in the past, anyone who believes that other inducements are not deployed, is a fool.

There should simply be no planning permissions given for change of use of both the Merrion Inn and the adjacent service station.

Irish investors put €8 billion into overseas commercial property in 2006 and €3 billion into domestic commercial property.

It is expected that when figures will the published, it will be shown that less than €200 million in venture capital investment, went into Irish business in 2006 - 0.025% of what went into commercial property.

World Economic Forum: Searingly blunt advice from Davos

Sever Plocker is chief economics editor and deputy editor-in chief of Yedioth Abaronot, Israel's largest Hebrew daily newspaper and he gives searingly blunt advice to his compatriots.

"My advice to those planning to attend the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at the prestigious Swiss ski resort of Davos is, I beg you, to stay away if you haven't yet boarded the plane. Please don't come, because it's no great honor being an Israeli this year at Davos. In fact, it’s humiliating," Plocker writes.

Plocker says Israel is no longer viewed as a thriving, high tech superpower or even as a brutal occupation power. It is viewed in a completely different light:

It's seen as a declining and dysfunctional country whose president is about to face charges of rape, whose prime minister will be interrogated on suspicion of advancing his associates' interests, whose finance minister will be ousted from his post due to an affair involving finances and non-profit organizations, whose army chief already resigned due to the failures of the war, and whose defense minister will soon be forced to follow suit.

This is the state of affairs in Israel in the winter of 2007 as seen by the world's surprised economic, political and academic elites, arriving in Davos for four days of sessions focusing on the fate of humanity.

A dark shadow has fallen on Israel's image worldwide. Until we remove it, these honorable people will hesitate to shake our hands, identify with us and invest in Israel. They are already hesitating.

Plocker says our long term friends, veterans of the Davos conferences, are pulling me aside and asking me in an embarrassing whisper: "What's happened to you Israelis? How did you get this way? Are you a country full of rapists and corrupt people?"

"The bitter and embarrassing truth of the matter is that Israel's image in Davos – a prism of the world's elite – has reached its nadir.

It's very unpleasant being an Israeli at Davos 2007; it's unpleasant but we deserve it," Sever Plocker concludes.

There is no spin or gloss when it comes to Plocker. He delivers tough medicine indeed.

Parish-pump politics without attending to the pump

Parish-pump politics have their place as long as the pump is actually attended to when required.

Some years ago, Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown council in South Dublin carried out a botched refurbishment of the main street in Blackrock village.

It was just finished when some holes were dug by the PermanentTsb office and a few shovels of tarmacadam were "temporarily" put on the handiwork.

For the two subsequent years, councillors, council officials and the public traipsed over the rickety pavement.

Shur why would there be accountability at such a mundane level, when there's none all the way up the ladder??

Last Saturday, the Irish Independent reported that Dublin's local authorities have paid out over €15m in compensation to people who injured themselves walking on dangerous footpaths.

And Dublin City Council spent more compensating injured parties than it did repairing pavements between 2001 and 2005.

Figures compiled by Fine Gael show that Dublin City spent €8.7m in compensation but just €7.3m repairing footpaths during the same period.

Dun Laoghaire Rathdown paid out almost €1.9m for injuries, while spending €4m on repairs; South Dublin paid out €1.4m in compensation and €3.6m on maintenance; and Fingal County Council spent €2.9m on compensation and €4.1m on repairs. In all, €14.9m was spent on compensation and €19.2m on repairs.

Fine Gael senator Brian Hayes accused the government parties of failing to ensure that public funds were spent effectively.

"The underfunding of local government often means that paths in need of repair are left in a poor state, resulting in falls and other injuries. Claims for injuries such as this have amounted to a staggering €15m in Dublin alone."

But the Department of the Environment denied Senator Hayes's claims, saying that local authorities were free to spend money from their own funds on repairing footpaths.

Where there's no system of accountability and responsibility, it's a recurring theme: The Buck Stop Nowhere!

The penny drops for the National Roads Authority - Rest areas on motorways are needed after all

N11 motorway near Arklow, County Wicklow Photo credit: Ireland.ru

Transport Minister Martin Cullen on Tuesday announced details of the Government’s €1.53 billion investment of funds in the 2007 National Roads Programme. This investment in the country’s roads, represents the largest single annual investment in road infrastructure in the history of the State.

On Wednesday, the National Roads Authority announced that it has begun seeking sites to build rest areas on motorways, which have already been opened.

The penny has dropped that the dismissal of rest areas as unnecessary was bizarre, stupid and simply beyond belief.

The argument was that a driver in need of petrol, a pee or a rest could find a village off the motorway.

The stupidity of the argument, is as my mother would have said, enough to make a dog strike his father.

Last December, it was reported that up to €4.6bn of the €18.5bn of taxpayers' money that will be spent on new main roads over the next decade will go into the pockets of landowners. Fred Barry, chief executive of the National Roads Authority is reported as saying that the increases in the cost of land for major roads projects as "disturbing".

Land acquisition accounts for 23% of the cost of roads projects in Ireland, but just 12% in England, 10% in Denmark, 9.4% in Greece and 1% in Iceland. A further 2% of the €18.5bn provided in the Government's Transport 21 for road building over the next decade will go to archaeologists.

Before Tom Parlon joined the self-styled party of enterprise, the Progressive Democrats, he led a successful campaign as leader of the Irish Farmer's Association (IFA), to force the Government to compensate farmers at development land prices.

The IFA, the representatives of farmers who are huge beneficiaries of European taxpayer largesse (rich Ireland is still in the money, having German and Dutch taxpayers fund the bonanza) in 2001, had the cheek to claim that the State had no right to appropriate land for roadbuilding via a Compulsory Purchase Order.

Now, the geniuses at the NRA and their political master Martin Cullen will have to go cap-in-hand to farmers again for land for service areas.

I'm an optimistic person but this type of carry-on without anyone taking responsibility for it, would depress a saint.

The China Effect on European Import Prices is Waning

In October 2006, the world's biggest container ship, the Emma Maersk, owned by A.P. Moeller Maersk of Denamrk, docked for the first time in the UK port of Felixtowe loaded with nearly 45,000 tons of Chinese-made goods including MP3 players, computers, Christmas trees and crackers. The Emma Maersk, which is 400 metres long (1,300 ft), 56 metres wide and 60 metres tall, and dubbed the SS Santa, unloaded more than 3,000 containers for supermarkets and stores before heading to mainland Europe.

To day, the UK Office of National Statistics reported that annual UK consumer prices rose 3% in December. The all items retail prices index (RPI), including mortgage payments, rose by 4.4 per cent, up from 3.9 per cent in November.

As in Ireland, many UK consumer goods have actually fallen over the past decade because of imports from China counterbalancing high rises in service inflation..

While transport costs, were a big factor in the rise of UK consumer prices, it is also thought a waning in the Chinese impact of falling manufactured goods prices, is having an impact.

Last autumn, Governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King said in a speech:

Over the past decade the integration of China, India and other emerging markets in Asia into the world trading system has lowered the prices of clothes, electrical goods and other items that we import from them. The terms on which we trade with the rest of the world improved. That provided a boost to real disposable incomes and so to consumer spending. But the rapid growth of China and India also meant sharp increases in the prices of many commodities, such as copper, aluminium, iron ore and, particularly important, oil. In that sense the rises in oil prices over the past two years are very different from the oil price “shocks” of the 1970s. They reflect rapid growth in the demand for oil – faster than the growth of capacity – rather than an OPEC-inspired contraction of supply. What we have seen is not so much an “oil shock” but a consequence of the rise of China.

The lower prices for many consumer goods and the higher cost of oil are both the result of globalisation. Having benefited from the former we are now experiencing the latter. As a result, our import prices are no longer falling as rapidly as they were, and, indeed, over the past year even the prices of non-oil imports have risen. With the additional impact of higher oil prices, real disposable incomes are rising more slowly, and the long awaited rebalancing of the economy away from consumer spending to business investment and net exports is underway.

In the US, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's biggest retailer, imports about $18 billion annually. The imports are evidence of how China effectively exports deflation to the rest of the world.

The Wall Street Journal reported in early January that the Chinese currency's rising value has started to pinch an increasing number of businesses here, eroding already thin profit margins, forcing them to reduce expenses and sometimes costing them business.

The Journal said that tightly controlled Chinese yuan has crept up 6% since July 2005, when the government loosened its link to the US dollar. Its gains against the dollar are modest compared with the sharper run-ups of other currencies, such as the euro. But the pace of the upswing has been unusually fast for China, where until recently companies had almost no experience with currency fluctuations against the dollar.

The stronger yuan is reducing the profit Zhenhua Port Machinery Co. earns on its big shipping-container cranes when they are sold in dollars. To cushion the blow, Zhenhua is raising prices, changing sales terms and looking for efficiencies in its manufacturing processes. The yuan "revaluation obviously hit us," says Wang Jue, board secretary of the Shanghai company.

Zhejiang Dongyang Haisen Trading Co., a maker of beverage containers in eastern China, says the yuan move has entirely erased its 2% or 3% profit margin on basic products. For now, the company is offering a newer, pricier line of products for export orders, says sales manager Zhang Shengquan. "What we hope is that the appreciation [of the yuan] could slow down a bit," Mr. Zhang says.

As the yuan continues to edge up, so will China's export prices, says Edward Leung, chief economist of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, a government-funded industry group. Manufacturing costs in China already face rising labor and materials expenses, he says. Further gains by the yuan will leave exporters with little choice but to charge more.

The Journal reports that US companies that have extensive operations in China are also feeling the effects. In a regulatory filing, Measurement Specialties Inc., an instrument maker based in Hampton, Va., said in November that the yuan's rise has "resulted in lower margins since a large portion of our products is manufactured in our China facility."

In neighbouring Asian countries, competition between Japanese and South Korean flat TV manufacturers is also benefiting western consumers.

The message is that interest rates may have to be increased to a higher rate for a more sustained period, if the positive impact of falling prices of imports from Asia wanes.

Tackling financial illiteracy

Ed Balls, former Financial Times journalist, is tipped to be appointed Chancellor when Gordon Brown succeeds Tony Blair as Prime Minister - - that is the game plan anyway!

Given that almost every adult has some exposure to the tax system, it seems bizarre that one can pass through the educational system and not have a clue about its basic essentials.

Payroll departments have the unenviable task of answering questions: why was my pay cut this week ? and similar questions.

The UK has today proposed a plan to address financial illiteracy and it's likely to be adopted in Ireland in coming years.

Every adult is to be offered free basic advice about financial products in a nationwide scheme to be set up within five years.

Ministers have appointed Otto Thoresen, chief executive of Aegon UK, British arm of the Dutch insurer, to lead a task force to design it by the year's end.

The service will provide advice about transactions from mortgages and pensions to investing in the UK government's Child Trust Fund, or baby bond.

The Treasury reckons inability of millions of adults to get to grips with basic financial information hampers economic efficiency and entrenches poverty.

Today Ed Balls, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, launched the Government's long-term approach to financial capability, with James Purnell, Pensions Reform Minister, at the Anne Taylor Children's Centre in Hackney.

Speaking at the Centre, Ed Balls announced that a new taskforce has been asked to research and design a national generic financial advice service - ensuring that every person, including those on the lowest incomes, can get quick, easy and simple access to good quality financial advice. A cross-departmental Ministerial group will co-ordinate the Government's work plan to enhance financial capability ensure Government programmes link effectively to the new advice service.
The Government believes that everyone in society has the right to get advice they can understand and trust on the financial options available to them, from getting out of debt through to choosing a home and saving for a pension.

Otto Thoresen will report to Ministers by the end of the year. The Government will publish an action plan by the end of 2007 setting out how financial capability will be integrated into existing services, particularly for those most vulnerable to the consequences of poor financial skills and taking forward plans for a national approach to generic financial advice.

The Financial Times says that the scheme is likely to comprise a national helpline and website and network of new and existing local advice centres. It will link to independent financial advisers or product providers.

The service will cost about £50m a year, to be shared by the taxpayer and the financial services industry. The service will be open to all. Efforts will be made to encourage low-income groups to use it. It will be in place by 2012, in time for introduction of Personal Accounts: a pension savings scheme into which up to 10m employees will be enrolled.

Today's announcement coincides with the Office for National Statistics publication of its personal inflation calculator to let people work out their personal inflation rate. The new ONS website will allow users to see how their spending patterns deviate from the national average.

David Quinn and the Institute of the Pieties

David Quinn speaking at an ecumenical lecture on the topic "the Churches and the Media"

According to Wikipedia, David Quinn is one of Ireland's best known religious and social affairs commentators. For over six years he was editor of The Irish Catholic, Ireland's main Catholic weekly newspaper.

Quinn may well have written the foregoing hagiography himself, but there is no doubt that this cocktail of careerism, egotism and sense of mission to return Ireland to an idealistic sense of simplicity without the blatant hypocrisies of the past, must be challenged in a direct manner.

In the United States, the likes of Quinn are spearheading right-wing organizations allied to President George Bush's Republican Party.

Quinn, whose main source of income is as a columnist for the Irish Independent daily newspaper and the weekly The Irish Catholic, recently established the pompously named Iona Institute, with its allusion to the seventh century Irish monk St Colmcille, who may or not have been a whited sepulchre .

Iona says that society will not recognise the importance of marriage and religion unless a convincing, evidence-based case, is made for them. The Iona Institute is dedicated to making this case thereby adding an important voice to Irish public debate.

It aims to do so through the commissioning of relevant position papers by experts in their fields including social scientists, lawyers and psychiatrists, through the formulation of workable policies, especially in the area of marriage and the family, through sponsoring research and opinion polling, and through organising seminars on relevant topics.

The Director of the Iona Institute is David Quinn, who is one of Ireland's best known religious and social affairs commentators.

Among the patrons of Quinn's adventure is Breda O'Brien, a teacher who has a column in The Irish Times, published on a Saturday and James Sheehan, a founder of the Blackrock, Galway Clinics and Hermitage Clinics - "private medical facilities which operate according to a Catholic ethos."

Merriam-Webster defines "ethos" as the distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution.

From my experience, it's a word that is generally used by pompous moralisers.

In the context of the Blackrock Clinic, which is a business that provides a good standard of service for those who can afford to buy it, I'm baffled as to where the issue of ethos is relevant compared with other health service facilities.

O'Brien comments in The Irish Times today on the role of marriage that "as the recent opinion poll commissioned by the Iona Institute shows, a majority of Irish people still support, and want the State to support, the two-parent family and marriage. Most people would support removing disincentives to marry from our tax and welfare code, for example."

What a surprise! The majority of adults marry and if Irish farmers were polled on the need for the Common Agricultural Policy, what would the result be!!

In Ireland, the in-your-face-approach of American counterparts of the Iona Institute wouldn't work but Quinn, like the American religious right, is seeking a political mouthpiece for his organisation.

This is what the US Family Research Council says about itself:

The Family Research Council (FRC) champions marriage and family as the foundation of civilization, the seedbed of virtue, and the wellspring of society. FRC shapes public debate and formulates public policy that values human life and upholds the institutions of marriage and the family. Believing that God is the author of life, liberty, and the family, FRC promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable society.

Core Principles

• God exists and is sovereign over all creation. He created human beings in His image. Human life is, therefore, sacred and the right to life is the most fundamental of political rights.
• Life and love are inextricably linked and find their natural expression in the institutions of marriage and the family.
• Government has a duty to promote and protect marriage and family in law and public policy.
• The American system of law and justice was founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic.
• American democracy depends upon a vibrant civil society composed of families, churches, schools, and voluntary associations.

In the Irish Independent on Friday, Quinn made a pitch for Fine Gael to return to its traditional role as conservative lapdog for the Catholic Church.

Quinn wrote that in the 1980s Garret (FitzGerald, former party leader and Taoiseach) began to rewrite the DNA of Fine Gael. He set out to transform it from a Christian Democrat party into a Social Democrat/liberal one.

Back in the 1980s, when the liberal agenda was still very much a live issue, that made a lot of electoral sense. There was a big liberal vote out there for the taking and it was going to go to either Fine Gael or Labour. Thanks to Garret it went to Fine Gael, but at a huge long-term cost. Once the liberal agenda was more or less delivered (and that happened with the divorce referendum of 1995), that vote began to evaporate.

Fine Gael began to boil down again to its core vote, only this had become smaller because Garret had managed to alienate many of the Christian Democrats who once voted for it.

Quinn is careful not to be specific about his Christian Democrat agenda. All we know is that in the past - it meant anti-divorce, anti-gay, anti-single parent, while turning a blind-eye to abuses by the powerful in society.

There were aspects to that agenda, which were the antithesis of values that Christianity claims to represent.

We may have to wait for the research from the Institute of the Pieties and no doubt, some of it will be funded by taxpayers' money.

Isn't debate great - middle class gasbags ladling each other with rich rhetoric - and new opportunities for the survey industry!

Just this week, we had an excellent example of actionless action from the Minister for Children Brian Lenihan. A proposed referendum on the constitutional rights of children has been dropped as rights to schooling and other issues could be quite a headache for politicians. So in a style befitting of the Yes Minister television series, why not spend €24 million on surveying thousands of children over a seven-year period to help policymakers??

It will truly provide great gas and fodder for radio and television chat shows in years to come, with the do-gooders from the Institute of the Pieties, the nanny-knows-best pop-psychologists and other spoofers.

Why Garret the Good was bad for Fine Gael

Friday January 12th 2007

WHEN Fianna Fail first entered coalition government in 1989, it was hailed as a huge step forward by all who claim to love and cherish democracy. Gone were the days when Fianna Fail could enter single-party government. Gone were the days of its pre-eminence. It was a sign of this once mighty party's perhaps terminal decline.

Or at least that's how it seemed 18 years ago when Fianna Fail entered power with the Progressive Democrats. But it isn't how things turned out. In fact, the day Fianna Fail, led by Charles Haughey, entered coalition government was not good for democracy, as some believed - it was very bad because it was now obscenely difficult to remove Fianna Fail from power. But if it was bad for democracy, it was an absolute calamity for Fine Gael.

Fine Gael might have imagined back in those halcyon days that the only way for it was up. Where would those lost Fianna Fail votes go? Surely some of them at least would go to Fine Gael.

No. Instead those lost Fianna Fail voters became floating voters.

But much worse for Fine Gael was the fact that by becoming a willing coalition partner, it became vastly easier than ever before for Fianna Fail to remain in power, and vastly more difficult for Fine Gael to get into power.

The hard, brutal reality is that since Fianna Fail first went into coalition government it has been out of power for just three years, and that wasn't because it lost an election - it was because Labour in mid-term swapped Fianna Fail for Fine Gael as its preferred coalition partner.

To put it another way, since the first Fianna Fail coalition government, Fine Gael hasn't been on the winning side in a single election, and it doesn't look as if that's going to change anytime soon.

It is bad enough for Fine Gael that Fianna Fail no longer insists on single-party government, but what compounds the problem is the fact that, aside from 1992, it can never seem to win enough seats to make it a viable coalition partner for Labour.

In other words, it has been hit by a double-whammy. The first is Fianna Fail's willingness to enter coalition government; the second is its inability to win enough votes for itself.

What's the cause of this second problem? One answer, the main answer, is a man by the name of Garret FitzGerald. In the 1980s Garret began to rewrite the DNA of Fine Gael. He set out to transform it from a Christian Democrat party into a Social Democrat/liberal one.

Back in the 1980s, when the liberal agenda was still very much a live issue, that made a lot of electoral sense. There was a big liberal vote out there for the taking and it was going to go to either Fine Gael or Labour. Thanks to Garret it went to Fine Gael, but at a huge long-term cost. Once the liberal agenda was more or less delivered (and that happened with the divorce referendum of 1995), that vote began to evaporate.

Fine Gael began to boil down again to its core vote, only this had become smaller because Garret had managed to alienate many of the Christian Democrats who once voted for it.

Gay Mitchell and Mairead McGuinness are probably in a broad sense the two best exemplars of that tradition within Fine Gael, but they aren't dominant enough in the party to change its DNA back to its original state.

The upshot is that Fine Gael is now a party lost in the wilderness. No one is entirely sure what it stands for, including itself. It doesn't know whether to appeal to the now mostly vanished followers of Garret, or to its old Christian Democrat base. Instead it offers voters a question mark, and, as a wise person once observed, people will be attracted to a decisive exclamation mark, but they will never be attracted to a doubtful question mark. Fine Gael! should not be Fine Gael?

So what will Fine Gael voters now do come the next general election? Many will stick loyally to their party despite the fact that it has so little chance of attaining power. But others might calculate that, since Fianna Fail is bound to be returned to government no matter what, it might be best to vote for one of its two most likely coalition partners - that is, either Labour or the PDs.

In that way they can produce a government that is either left-of-centre or right-of-centre and their vote will not be wasted. But if this is what Fine Gael voters are reduced to, it is bad for Fine Gael and it is also bad for democracy. We need a genuine choice at election time and Fine Gael's continuing identity crisis means we don't have it.

Eco-extremism and climate change

Climate change is getting a lot of attention and rightly so. However, there has to be a balance in how much sacrifice people living today should make for future generations as it's usually the less well-off that are lumped with the greatest burden.

The European Commission says that global emissions need to be cut by around 50% by the middle of this century if we are to have a chance of keeping climate change within tolerable limits – that is, if we are to hold the global average temperature rise to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That is some challenge.

Technology will be one factor. Japanese car manufacturer Toyota for example has reduced energy use in manufacturing 30% since 2000. The US uses about the same amount of energy today as it did 30 years ago.

The EU has pioneered the emission trading system that results in a cost for those who do not pay attention to carbon.

In a blistering attack that echoes Europe's budget airline's CEO Michael O'Leary's dismissal of advocates of restrictions on air travel as "nutbags," car firm Daimler-Chrysler's chief economist Van Jolissaint has attacked "quasi-hysterical Europeans" and their "Chicken Little" attitudes to global warming.

Tony Blair told a press conference on Tuesday: "This country leads the world both in terms of the issue of climate change and also meeting our Kyoto targets on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. But I am not going to be in the situation of saying I'm not going to take holidays abroad or use air travel. It's just not practical."

Earlier he sparked fierce criticism from green groups and opposition parties by giving a Sky News interview in which he refused to take breaks closer to home and said no politician would end cheap flights.

One of Blair's advisers, environmental activist Sir Jonathon Porritt acknowledged that Blair had done more than any other world leader to raise awareness about climate change but said there was "a complete failure" to show leadership on the issue in Britain.

He told BBC Radio 4 it was "completely wrong" for the Prime Minister to suggest scientists could be relied on to find a painless solution to global warming and to think that voters were unwilling to change their own behaviour. "I am not saying Mr Blair should never take another foreign holiday, but I am saying that he should be looking carefully at the impacts of those holidays," he said.

Sir Jonathon accused Blair of having "a policy of complete fatalistic despair" by arguing that Britain accounted for only 2 per cent of global carbon emissions. "If we are going to advise and influence other countries to reduce emissions, we have got to take the lead ourselves - in our own lives and as a nation through the economy," he said.

To advocate extreme action while competitors for jobs are doing otherwise is a luxury for people on a payroll who have no fear of unenemployment.

John Gummer, a former secretary of state for the environment , said Blair's defence of his "shaming" long-haul trips was "a great dereliction of duty".

Chris Huhne, environment spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, said Blair's remarks showed he was "delusional" on climate change and that his environmentalism was only "skin deep".

Just wonder how many holidays they will take in Bournemouth until it becomes the new Riveria?

It's a fair bet that most of the eco-extremists want to have their cake and eat it too and nothing will please some of them.

In 1994, Dr. Patrick Moore a founder of Greenpeace who's cenrist approach has been rejected by some of his former colleagues, wrote in 1994:

For me, Greenpeace is about ringing an ecological fire alarm, waking mass consciousness to the true dimensions of our global predicament, pointing out the problems and defining their nature. Greenpeace doesn't necessarily have the solutions to those problems and certainly isn't equipped to put them into practice. That requires the combined efforts of governments, corporations, public institutions and environmentalists. This demands a high degree of cooperation and collaboration. The politics of blame and shame must be replaced with the politics of working together and win-win.

Ireland and Northern European countries to benefit from global warming if Gulf Stream doesn't slow; Ryanair's Michael O'Leary wins war of words with UK minister

Xenophobia off Menu for more than 200,000 people who are Homeless or living in temporary shelter in Paris

The Tuileries Gardens in central Paris © Musée du Louvre / A. Dequier

The Financial Times reports today that volunteers who ladled it out to the homeless of Paris called it "pig soup". Now it has been taken off the menu following accusations that the dominant aroma wafting up from the bowl was xenophobia, not pork.

The Conseil d'Etat, France's highest authority on administrative law, has banned an organisation called Solidarité des Français from distributing its soup containing pig ears, feet and tails to the capital's rough sleepers.

On Friday night, the court announced that it had upheld an earlier decision by the Paris police chief to shut down the soup kitchen, which has been accused of discriminating against Muslims and Jews, whose religions forbid the consumption of pork.

This decision had been suspended on appeal, prompting the interior ministry, led by presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, to demand that the Conseil d'Etat intervene. Bertrand Delanoë, Paris's mayor, also pushed for a ban, claiming that the handouts stank of xenophobia.

The volunteer group claimed the recipe was a hearty expression of traditional rural French cooking. However, Solidarité des Français has a clear political agenda. Its website criticises the use of government funds to teach French to immigrant women, while also attacking aid to Morocco, Senegal and Algeria.

Last February, the New York Times reported that more than 200 political activists defied a police ban to demonstrate in Paris, scurrying across the Boulevard Saint Germain and under the plane trees of Place Maubert to engage in their forbidden action: eating "pig soup" in public.

With steaming bowls of the fragrant broth soon passing through the crowd, Odile Bonnivard, a secretary turned far-right firebrand, climbed atop a car with a megaphone in hand and led the crowd in a raucous chant: "We are all pig eaters! We are all pig eaters!""Identity soup," as the broth has come to be called, is one of the stranger manifestations of a grass-roots backlash against the multiculturalism that has spread through Europe over the past 20 years.

People are challenging the care taken in Nazi-chastened Europe, and in France in particular, to avoid racial or religious insults of the sort that led to protests in the Islamic world a year ago after the publication of cartoons that most Muslims considered offensive to the Prophet Muhammad.

The movement began in the winter of 2003 when Bonnivard, a member of a small far-right nationalist movement called the "Identity Bloc," began serving hot soup to the homeless.At first, she said, the group used pork simply because it was an inexpensive traditional ingredient for hearty French soup. But as the political significance of serving pork dawned on them and others, it quickly became the focus of their work.

In France there is little tolerance for anything that challenges the republic's egalitarian ideals. But the authorities initially left the pork soup kitchen alone, shutting it down only once to avoid an altercation with a group of indignant French leftists.

That was before the riots that swept France in November 2005, forcing the government to face up to the deep alienation felt by the country's Muslim youth. As winter closed in and other pork-soup kitchens run by similar-minded groups popped up in Strasbourg and Nice - as well as Brussels, Antwerp and Charleroi in Belgium - the authorities worried that they might be witnessing the start of a dangerous racist trend.

The New York Times reports that in December 2005, Bonnivard said, a van of plainclothes police chased her soup- bearing car through the streets, and several busloads of police officers arrived to stop her group from setting up at their usual spot near the Montparnasse train station, citing "the discriminatory nature of the soup." She and her band filed an appeal.

Finfacts report from June 2006:

More than half the world’s population will live in a city by 2007; More than 200,000 people are homeless or living in temporary shelter in Paris

Asia-Europe budget airline

When I was in Kuala Lumpur last week, the plans of Malaysian businessman Tony Fernandes to launch a long-haul service to Europe were getting a lot of attention.

Fernandes is the founder of AirAsia, the top budget carrier in South-East Asia and plans to begin his long-haul budget service on the Kuala Lumpur-London route. Direct flying time is about 13 hours.

Last year we carried a story on the very attractive cost of living in Kuala Lumpur. The country is also a very attractive tourist location.

I had the pleasure of staying in the 5-star Mandarin Oriental Hotel in KL, at a rate comparable with Jurys Inn budget rates in Dublin. A visit to the dentist for teeth-cleaning cost €11 - and it was a dentist who did the task. A filling can cost as low as €15.

Analysts suggest that the requirement to provide food on long-haul flights, creates a difficulty in applying the low-cost airline model.

However, what strikes me is that the quality of food and service for economy passengers on legacy carriers, has set a very low threshold.

On a Kuala Lumpur-Doha flight last week, the tantalizing selection for breakfast was scrambled eggs and cheese and omelette and cheese. I hate eggs.

After a 90 minute layover at Doha, it was still breakfast (which for an airline is convenient) and Hobson's Choice was again on the menu again.

Irish Travellers should avoid Heathrow Airport like the Plague if getting Connecting Flights to non-UK destinations

London Heathrow Airport is the world’s busiest international airport. It is the UK’s largest airport and handles 64 million passengers every year. Photo: www.skyparksecure.com . Terminal 4 was an oasis of calm in the early 1990's but now more resembles the chaotic Dublin Airport. British Airways will move into Terminal 5 in 2008. On its own Terminal 5 will be the third largest airport in Europe after Frankfurt and the rest of Heathrow.The move will "transform the flying experience for the 30 million British Airways passengers" who pass through Heathrow airport each year. The whole experience will be faster, smoother and simpler." However, that is little consolation for Irish travellers arriving at Terminal 1 who have to enter the UK to move to remaining terminals.

British Airways (BA) has today apologised to passengers who have lost their luggage during the fog-disrupted holiday season and said that it would reunite thousands of missing bags with their owners.

About 10,000 bags did not make it to their intended destination over the Christmas period and Channel 4 News reported this evening that more than 7,000 luggage pieces remain undelivered at London's Heathrow Airport.

It also reported that Nigerians had made death threats in Lagos against BA staff because of undelivered luggage.

The airline was severely affected by the thick fog which enveloped much of the country before Christmas and also experienced a "fault with a baggage belt" at Terminal Four at Heathrow Airport.

Passengers are reported to have complained that they have seen piles of bags near the baggage carousels at Heathrow and questions have been raised about how secure the bags are in storage and the length of time it has taken to contact their owners.

Irish travellers who plan long-haul flights via European airports should avoid Heathrow like the plague. Schipol Airport in Amsterdam is generally my choice as Aer Lingus has a code-sharing arrangement with KLM and it's not necessary to re-enter a terminal to board a connecting flight. Frankfurt Airport is also a good choice for travelling eastward.

Getting a boarding card for the connecting flight is a big advantage but Aer Lingus' decision to withdraw from the One World alliance limits that facility.

I unfortunately ended up having to get to Heathrow's Terminal 3 and Terminal 4 on two recent occasions. Even though my bags were booked through to their final destinations, I had to join long queues to get boarding cards.

On Sunday evening, after 27 hours from the time I set out for Kuala Lumpur International Airport, I arrived into a grim Dublin Airport and one bag had been left back in Heathrow. Aer Lingus did a good job in tracing it and delivering it on Monday.

Irish Public Transport and the Soviet-style Bureaucracy that runs Córas Iompair Éireann

Last November a survey bought/commissioned by the Dublin Transportation Office (DTO) had a startling revelation for people who need surveys to tell them what should be self-evident.

One-half of Dublin drivers would never use bus services, even if services were improved. Unreliability, long waiting times and poor connections were cited as the main reasons for not taking the bus. As many as four out of five people expressed dissatisfaction with traffic congestion and access to the Luas. Just over 35 per cent of those surveyed were satisfied with the quality and upkeep of roads, and with facilities for cycling.

It often occurs to me when passing through the Pearse Street train station in Dublin at rush hour, that anyone who wants an example of the result of a Soviet-style bureaucracy should visit it.

Our hapless Minister for Transport Martin Cullen and John Lynch, the head of the politburu that runs the State transport company Córas Iompair Éireann (CIÉ), most likely only use public transport when participating in photo opportunities.

Cullen has launched a multi-billion euro plan termed Transport 21 but the existing software leaves a lot to be desired.

At Pearse Street, as a train rumbles over the bridge traversing Westland Row during rush-hour, passengers stampede through a small nineteenth century crowded foyer as arriving passengers fight their way down gangways as other passengers elbow their way up to the platforms.

For a majority of the passengers, walking towards the left seems natural while possibly 30% who are foreign nationals may choose the right.

At Pearse, there is a stone stairway and a gangway with a steel divider but there are no arrow signalling that would simply improve the flow of passenger traffic.

What can be expected of a management that required travellers to Dublin who arrived at its headquarters at Hueston Station to have the correct change for a ride on the No. 90 bus into the city centre but nobody bothered to put up a display notice at the waiting area (most arriving passengers now take the Luas tram)?

Arriving from Cork on one occassion, I witnessed the bus driver telling a baffled young Italian, to collect change at an office on O'Connell Street.

As to taking the bus, standing at a bustop is an experience that been fixed in time. There is no electronic indication as to when a bus will arrive or if a service has been cancelled because of the illness of a driver.

Car drivers prefer the comfort of their cars and gridlock to another aspect of public transportation that is often ignored.

For the many plonkers who place their feet on seats, there is an innocuous request to refrain from it instead of a large notice indicating the such individuals are ignoramuses.

Manners are also in scarce supply as the general practice is to push onto a carriage as passengers are alighting. Then there are the people who would sneeze into your face and mobile phones! It's enough to make a dog strike his father!

When we can't get the small things right in a system where the Buck Stops Nowhere, just wonder how much will be wasted on Cullen's Transport 21 plan:

ESRI Report: Transport 21 slammed as seriously flawed

World Wide Wait in Malaysia

Located on the old site of the Royal Turf Club in the heart of the capital city, the Kuala Lumpur City Centre (KLCC) is truly a spectacular sight. Here, the 88-storey Petronas Twin Towers, the world's tallest twin structures, soars to a dizzying height of 452 metres. Inspired by the Five Pillars of Islam, this gleaming mega-structure was designed by Argentinean-American architect Cesar Pelli. Below lies a beautifully landscaped fountain park designed by prominent Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. KLCC is also home to the world-class Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, Suria Shopping Centre and Petronas Philharmonic Hall. On the left side of the image is the KL Tower, which provides a 360° panoramic view of the city at night from its revolving restaurant.

In school I learned of the several efforts to successfully lay a trans-Atlantic cable between Valentia Island, off the coast of Kerry in southwest Ireland, and Newfoundland, Canada, that led to the opening of a permanent communications link between Europe and North America, from July 1866.

News that an earthquake off Taiwan on Tuesday (St. Stephen’s Day) had severed key communications cables may have surprised some people that old-fashioned cable is still an important feature of today’s digital age.

Malaysia-based Internet users including myself, woke on Wednesday morning to a crawl on the so-called information superhighway. Local access to Internet services and websites hosted overseas came to a practical standstill after international links were disrupted by the earthquake that struck southern Taiwan on Tuesday night.

The earthquake damaged submarine cables that form part of the region-wide Asia Pacific Cable Network 2 (APCN 2), disrupting voice and Internet communications over much of Asia.

APCN 2 is a 19,000km-long fibre-optic cable network linking Japan, South Korea, China, Malaysia, Singapore, the United States, Europe and Australia. The network has been up since October 2002 and is jointly operated by 26 Asian telecommunications carriers.

Malaysia's The Star newspaper, reported that one group that had been badly hit by the disruption of Internet access was the blogger community.

Blogger Joyce Wong said she only managed to upload a few sentences onto her blog. "It is really getting to me because I have all my information and contacts online and I cannot get my work done,” said Wong, who is known as KinkyBlueFairy online.

For radio deejay cum music producer Johan Farid Khairuddin, the inability to post his blog meant that he has been disconnected from his fans.

“I blog very frequently – every five minutes if I may say so – and this breakdown has affected me emotionally as I am unable to interact with others,” said the 26-year-old.

Student Adrian Teh, 22, who blogs and reads his friends' posts regularly, said he felt hopeless.
Tech and gadgets blogger Albert Ng said he was not affected by the disruption because his weblog was in a local server.

However, the newspaper reported that he has had difficulties going to his friends' blogs as well as international e-mail sites.

Noor Faridah Zulkiflie was planning to revert to paper and pen since she was unable to post her blogs online.

“I feel wretched now because I have lots of pent-up feelings but unfortunately cannot write about them,” said the 22-year-old student.

Life can be tough and the rerouting of traffic has eased the frustration for Malaysians. So we have access to the safety valve again to release all those pent-up feelings!!

Happy New Year!!

Bertie Ahern's " patriot to his fingertips" and the legacy of a kleptocracy

In June 2006, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern gave a ringing peroration at the graveside of Charles Haughey and he indeed owed his deceased predecessor a great deal and knew more than most that his fellow Dublin northsider had been on the make, on a gigantic scale.

Political courage is a rare commodity and not to put a tooth in it, Ahern backed the right horse and won hugely.

"If the definition of a patriot is someone who devotes all their energy to the betterment of their country," Ahern said: "Charles Haughey was a patriot to his fingertips."

"Despite the controversy, even political opponents acknowledge that he had indeed done the State some service," he said. "The ultimate judgement of history will be positive."

Ahern spoke of how he remembered as a teenager canvassing for "Charlie" at election. "He was one of us, he was larger than life," he said.

The Taoiseach compared Haughey to the poet WB Yeats whom he said was a great but complex man, "impatient for the progress of our country".

When Yeats wrote "I am of Ireland", Ahern said he could not have penned a better description of Haughey.

He described the former leader as a "consummate politician, who exhibited grace under pressure, incisive mind and superb parliamentary skills proud identity with all of Ireland and a profound respect in victory and defeat for our democratic institutions."

In his report, Mr. Justice Michael Moriarty said that Haughey "lived a lifestyle and incurred expenditure vastly beyond the scale" of his income and it concludes that Haughey "devalued the quality of a modern democracy".

"As one of Mr Haughey's successors I want to acknowledge that he left a huge legacy of lasting achievement that this generation has based its own progress upon," Ahern said.

There were undoubtedly achievements as there were in the case of Richard Nixon.

Bertie Ahern was a bookkeeper in the Mater Hospital before entering politics and presumably it wasn't a place where blank cheques were floating about.

Bertie Ahern certainly knew aspects of Haughey that were unknown by many others including what Justice Moriarity termed the "elements of fear and domination engendered by him in individuals in both the private and public sectors."

Ahern said last June that Haughey would ruefully acknowledge to him that he enjoyed the proverbial nine lives.

"Charlie, Boss the last of those lives has now been extinguished. Today the most agile and instinctive of our political leaders is still," the current Taoiseach concluded.

Boss, indeed.

The Taoiseach says Haughey had a profound respect for our democracy while Justice Moriarty said that he devalued it.

RELATED:

Comment: All the King's Men - The Ireland that made Charles Haughey

Cúpla focail and more hypocrisy on the Irish language

Beautiful Gougane Barra in the Cork Gaeltacht, near the source of the River Lee (Photo: www.gouganebarra.com )

The Government today set out 13 key objectives in respect of the Irish language as it is due to become the 21st official working language of the European Union on January 1st. It is unfortunate that the revival of the language since independence has been a failed effort by both leaders and people. Apart from former teachers such as Opposition leader Enda Kenny, most members of our national parliament cannot speak the language and it is rarely used by members. So what the Government served up today is another cúpla focail and lots more hypocrisy.

The 13 objectives include;

• Full implementation of the Official Languages Act and facilitation of the public's right to use Irish in dealings with the State.
• Provision of a wide range of services to parents who wish to raise their children through Irish.
• Continuous development of high-quality broadcast services through Irish, especially on TG4, RTÉ and Raidió na Gaeltachta.
• Special support for the Gaeltacht as an Irish-speaking area.
• Continuation of teaching of Irish as an obligatory subject from primary to Leaving Cert level while fostering oral and written competence.
• Enhanced investment in professional development and ongoing support for teachers as well as in provision of textbooks and resources and in support for innovative approaches to teaching and learning.
• Further development of all-Irish secondary education.

Speaking today, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern said that the statement marks "a major evolution" in national policy on the Irish language. A major evolution - yes if more lip service will serve any purpose. "The aim of 20th-century Government policies was to reinstate Irish as the main language spoken by the people, but the Government now plan to focus firmly on the practical development of a bilingual society where as many people as possible use both Irish and English with equal ease," Ahern said. Decades of lip-service and payments of grants has left the language in a parlous state. It is simply laughable that the Irish language would be used at EU ministerial level when most Irish politicians rarely speak the language apart from a few sentences if at all, at the start of a speech. Irish language content is also rare in the main Irish daily newspapers and it has never been a requirement to use Irish when communicating with public officials. So while this EU measure could be recognised as a belated recognition of an important part of Irish culture, it is sadly another example of what is wrong with the EU. Ahern may not even be able to speak Irish at an EU meeting, never mind one in Dublin but he welcomes a measure that at least until Ireland becomes a net payer to the EU Budget, will be paid in full by German, Dutch and British taxpayers.

Cynicism comes cheap, so here are views other than mine - the words of an official report that was presented to the Irish Government in 2002: The establishment of this Commission by the Government in the Spring of 2000 was a ray of hope to the people and friends of the Gaeltacht, people who for years have been concerned about the obvious decline and gradual extinction of the Gaeltacht. This Gaeltacht is all that remains of the large Irish-speaking community which was dominant in this country for hundreds of years, but has declined continuously in recent centuries. While the first major action taken by the Free State Government on behalf of the Gaeltacht was the establishment of the first Gaeltacht Commission in 1925, the proposals made by the Commission were not acted upon however, nor were the appropriate resources made available which would have been required in order to do so. Seventy-Seven Years Later... Taking into account the historical erosion of the Gaeltacht and the further decline in our own lifetime, the Commission is of the view that it will not be possible to maintain the Gaeltacht as an area in which Irish remains a community language unless a fundamental change occurs in the way Irish is treated and in the status of Irish in the rest of the country. Despite the progress made by individuals and language organisations it is not evident that any Government has the strategy or understanding to advance efforts on behalf of the language.

Although the Gaeltacht is the primary concern of this Commission, the issue of the Gaeltacht cannot be separated from the issue of the Irish language in the rest of the country. The Commission is not aware of any Government policy in which the Government’s view of the Irish language in contemporary society is articulated, nor of any vision that demonstrates that the Government has discussed the role of the Irish language in the life of the country. Neither does there exist any action plan containing measurable targets. The Commission is not aware of any such Government policy or plan. The Commission is of the view that the State is out of step with emerging world views on the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity. It is now recognised that every spoken language is a valuable resource which provides us with a particular world view – a view which is shaped by the past, which is precious and which stimulates creativity. The death of a language is recognised as an act of negligence which represents a world tragedy. If Irish is allowed to die, one of oldest languages in Europe and Ireland’s native language will be lost. The revitalization of Irish and all that goes with it is the sole responsibility of this country. If its just the intention to keep the language as a national monument, for use on ceremonial occasions and with the ‘cúpla focal’ being spoken from time to time, it is unlikely that Gaeltacht people will have much interest in retaining the language. It is as part of a national policy for the revival of Irish as a national language that the Commission feels that progress can best be achieved. The Commission also believes that a unique opportunity now exists to undertake this work in view of the Good Friday Agreement.

The aspirations that were served up today could only inspire a fool to believe that they will have any impact on the slow death of the Irish language.

Whited sepulchres of hypocritical moralism

De Wallen, also known as Walletjes or Rosse Buurt, is the largest and best-known red-light district in Amsterdam, a major tourist attraction. It is a network of alleys containing several hundred tiny one-room apartments rented by female prostitutes who offer their services from behind a window.

Many of us Irish like to believe that we're open minded and progressive but whether it's prostitution, illegal drugs or same-sex partnerships, there is little fear that we would make any progressive moves until the rest of Europe has travelled far ahead of us.

This week in Ireland and the UK , all three issues received extensive attention.

In 2004, the Economist wrote in an impressive editorial on prostitution, that the puritans have the whip hand not because they can prove that tough laws will make life better for women, but because they have convinced governments that prostitution is intolerable by its very nature. What has tipped the balance is the globalisation of the sex business.

Today, the Financial Times writes that morality is choosing to live one's life by a code of behaviour. Moralism is inflicting a puritanical code upon others.

Moralism kills. It leads to making prostitution and the use of drugs illegal. That brings ghastly results. Now, when the murders of five prostitutes in Suffolk are gripping the attention of the UK, all must see just how ghastly these results can occasionally be.

Finding prostitution abhorrent is quite understandable. It is equally understandable that people find the sale of dangerous drugs abhorrent. But policy should focus on consequences, not such emotions. Prohibition merely drives these practices further underground, thereby making bad worse.

In the UK, prostitution is not illegal. The position is far worse in the US, where it is illegal in all states, except Nevada. But even in the UK, soliciting and advertising by prostitutes, as well as "kerb-crawling" and, most important, living off the earnings of prostitutes are all illegal.

A brief glimmer of sanity broke out, with the publication of a thoroughly sensible review, Paying the Price, by the often unjustly condemned Home Office in July 2004. It did not take long for the UK's tabloid press, that whited sepulchre of hypocritical moralism, to douse the light once more.

Nothing will now be done to make the business safer for those engaged in it. That can only happen if it is possible to establish businesses, with secure premises, with proper security and medical checks. In other words, it can only happen with the legalisation of brothels. Instead, action against kerb-crawling is being intensified and the idea of establishing legal red-light areas has been abandoned.

This will merely drive the business yet further underground, where it will remain intertwined with another business driven into the darkness: drugs. Paying the Price estimated there were 80,000 people working in the sex industry in Britain, with 95 per cent of the women involved dependent on drugs. A close link exists between illegal drugs and prostitution, with pimps often suppliers of both.

Unable to work within properly regulated businesses, prostitutes are far more vulnerable to violent customers. Nobody can now try to ensure the safety of prostitutes even, as we can see, from the deranged attacks of a serial killer. Public indifference to the fate of these women explains, but cannot excuse, this immoral policy.

We will never eliminate either prostitution or the demand for drugs. But we can minimise the damage done by these twin evils: prostitutes must have the opportunity to work in safe and secure environments; addicts must be allowed safe and secure access, through the health service, to the drugs they crave. This is not to condone vice. It is to recognise the limits imposed by human frailty. Those who persist in peddling moralism instead have blood on their hands.

The Economist wrote two years ago that it is not surprising that many of the rich world's prostitutes are foreigners. Immigrants have a particularly hard time finding jobs that pay well; local language skills are not prized in the sex trade; prostitutes often prefer to work outside their home town. But the free movement of labour is as controversial in the sex trade as in any other business. Wherever they work, foreign prostitutes are accused of driving down prices, touting “extra” services and consorting with organised criminal pimps who are often foreigners, too. The fact that a very small proportion of women are trafficked—forced into prostitution against their will—has been used to discredit all foreigners in the trade, and by extension (since many sellers of sex are indeed foreign) all prostitutes.

Abolitionists make three arguments. From the right comes the argument that the sex trade is plain wrong, and that, by condoning it, society demeans itself. Liberals (such as this newspaper) who believe that what consenting adults do in private is their own business reject that line.

From the left comes the argument that all prostitutes are victims. Its proponents cite studies that show high rates of sexual abuse and drug taking among employees. To which there are two answers. First, those studies are biased: they tend to be carried out by staff at drop-in centres and by the police, who tend to see the most troubled streetwalkers. Taking their clients as representative of all prostitutes is like assessing the state of marriage by sampling shelters for battered women. Second, the association between prostitution and drug addiction does not mean that one causes the other: drug addicts, like others, may go into prostitution just because it's a good way of making a decent living if you can't think too clearly.

A third, more plausible, argument focuses on the association between prostitution and all sorts of other nastinesses, such as drug addiction, organised crime, trafficking and underage sex. To encourage prostitution, goes the line, is to encourage those other undesirables; to crack down on prostitution is to discourage them.

Brothels with brands

Plausible, but wrong. Criminalisation forces prostitution into the underworld. Legalisation would bring it into the open, where abuses such as trafficking and under-age prostitution can be more easily tackled. Brothels would develop reputations worth protecting. Access to health care would improve—an urgent need, given that so many prostitutes come from diseased parts of the world. Abuses such as child or forced prostitution should be treated as the crimes they are, and not discussed as though they were simply extreme forms of the sex trade, which is how opponents of prostitution and, recently, the governments of Britain and America have described them.

Puritans argue that where laws have been liberalised—in, for instance, the Netherlands, Germany and Australia—the new regimes have not lived up to claims that they would wipe out pimping and sever the links between prostitution and organised crime. Certainly, those links persist; but that's because, thanks to concessions to the opponents of liberalisation, the changes did not go far enough. Prostitutes were made to register, which many understandably didn't want to do. Not surprisingly, illicit brothels continued to thrive.

If those quasi-liberal experiments have not lived up to their proponents' expectations, they have also failed to fulfil their detractors' greatest fears. They do not seem to have led to outbreaks of disease or under-age sex, nor to a proliferation of street prostitution, nor to a wider collapse in local morals.

Which brings us back to that discreet transaction between two people in private. If there's no evidence that it harms others, then the state should let them get on with it. People should be allowed to buy and sell whatever they like, including their own bodies. Prostitution may be a grubby business, but it's not the government's.

...back to Ireland

This week, the High Court declared that same-sex marriage is incompatible with the Constitution but there is no rush to strengthen partnership rights such as in relation to inheritance, which would surely provide the rights that gay people demand.

As to illegal drugs and prostitution, there is no public debate on moving on from the status quo.

That would surely require political courage and vision - two very scarce commodities.

Fair Deal, Irish Nursing Homes and Harry Truman

There is surely an irony in the Government’s use of the term Fair Deal - President Harry Truman’s name for his political programme – for its new nursing home proposals.

President Truman had a sign on his desk that read – The Buck Stops Here. It would surely merit a cross on the mantlepiece if the Government adopted that principle too.

When has a Government Minister or senior civil servant last taken responsibility for incompetence or negligence in delivering public services and contracts?

There are about 1.7 million subscribers to health insurance to cover private health care because of the lack of confidence/trust in the public health service.

On the other hand, there is a greater trust in public nursing homes than private nursing homes that are largely viewed as giving primacy to moneymaking.

As the role of the religious withdrew from nursing home services, the Government response was to provide tax incentives similar to one available for car parks and holiday homes, to encourage the building of nursing homes.

So people with significant income to shield from tax who never had any professional involvement in a health service, got their accountants to produce business plans and hired a matron to run the nursing home.

Should we then be surprised that many of these nursing homes have been poorly run?

Compounding the issue, was the typical lack of "software" in the system i.e. no credible inspectorate.

As to the proposals to claw back up to 15% from the sale of a house on death, with 900,000 Irish workers without a pension, the equity in a house is an important cushion that wil now be reduced in potential for a significant segment of the population.